


how did a middle-class divorcé do it?

by Time_Sequence



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: AU, M/M, Weddings, abdication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25975195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Time_Sequence/pseuds/Time_Sequence
Summary: Not really concerned, Alex watched the typing bubble appear – disappear – appear again, like Henry couldn’t quite find the words to say what it was he was thinking. Most likely, he was trying to find the perfect sarcastic quip in response.What came through made him genuinely pause.HRH Prince Dickhead💩: You complete and utter moronThen,HRH Prince Dickhead💩: Royalty can’t marry divorceesIf Alex had been having a good time before, he definitely wasn’t now.-When a joking interview reveals that Alex and Nora drunkenly married ten years ago, suddenly Alex's upcoming wedding to Prince Henry is jeopardised.
Relationships: Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor
Comments: 26
Kudos: 308





	how did a middle-class divorcé do it?

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this tumblr post: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/actuallygago/625643507375276032

It started with a throwaway comment in an interview.

Really, Alex should have known better by now. He of all people knew how quickly the press could take a story and blow it out of proportion, but he was always at pains to learn his lesson and there was no taking it back now.

He and Nora had been interviewing all day at that point, and though he usually tried to keep it professional, even more so now that he was an official royal suitor _and_ fiancé to Prince Henry, Nora had always been a bad influence. She also always got a little manic after the fifth consecutive hour of answering the same questions in slightly different ways for soundbites and manic Nora was unpredictable at the best of times.

 _“Now_ ,” the interviewer had said. _“Everyone knows about Alex’s dating life, of course – congratulations on your engagement, by the way – but is there anyone special out there for you that we should know about, Nora?”_

 _“Well, actually, there is,”_ Nora had answered, giving Alex a toothy grin and sideways glance that made him both excited and nervous for what she was going to say next. You never did quite know with Nora. _“Ten years ago, I married my best friend.”_

Alex saw the shock register on the interviewer’s face – and the barely masked glee at being the one who got to break this story. _“Henry and June are still angry about it, but Alex and I were drunk and thought it would be funny.”_ For good measure, she gave Alex a friendly pat on the cheek.

Alex and Nora had spent the entire rest of the afternoon and well into the night giggling like schoolchildren about it and watching the number of people screaming about the interview on the internet grow by the thousands until the footage and associated hashtag started trending on twitter. Quicker than lightning Buzzfeed had cranked out a tongue in cheek think piece about it and Nora read it aloud to him in their hotel room as he snickered and opened another can of beer. They both found it hilarious. Everyone else seemed to, too.

His phone chimed and he saw a message from Henry, linking to a YouTube video with the interview clip. He had two clocks programmed into his phone, New York and London, and knew that Henry would have just woken up to the news. While they mainly lived together in their brownstone, that didn’t change the fact that Henry still often had appearances on the other side of the Atlantic that he had to fly back for. Being a prince was a full-time job occupation.

HRH Prince Dickhead💩: Please tell me this is a joke

Frowning, Alex typed back a message – _‘??????’_ – pressed send.

HRH Prince Dickhead💩: I leave you alone for two days

HRH Prince Dickhead💩: Seriously, though, please tell me you were joking

Actually, he wasn’t. He didn’t know how this had never come up before, now that he thought about it, but he and Nora _had_ technically tied the knot once after far too many tequila shots on a night out. They both had shitty polaroid pictures of the occasion as mementos in which they were hazy, blurry figures, barely even recognisable as themselves. Alex had kept his because he’d thought it was a perfect encapsulation of his memories of that night.

They’d never told anyone – never done anything about it – because it hadn’t changed anything between them. They were still best friends.

Alex: actually yeah, it is true?

Alex: sorry you had to find out that way but it’s easily fixable

Not really concerned, Alex watched the typing bubble appear – disappear – appear again, like Henry couldn’t quite find the words to say what it was he was thinking. Most likely, he was trying to find the perfect sarcastic quip in response.

What came through made him genuinely pause.

HRH Prince Dickhead💩: You complete and utter moron

Then,

HRH Prince Dickhead💩: Royalty can’t marry divorcees

If Alex had been having a good time before, he definitely wasn’t now.

*

“What do you _mean_ ‘royalty can’t marry divorcees’?”

“What do you mean _‘I’m already married’_?” came Henry’s voice from the other end of the phone, tinny on speaker. He had to admit he had a point.

“Wait – wait. Let’s back up. It’s not, like, a _real_ marriage. Sure, it’s consummated, but we were together for such a short amount of time that it wouldn’t count, right? And we’ve basically been separated for the entirety of it – you can get an annulment if you’ve been separated for however long, can’t you? We’d have got it annulled before the wedding, anyway.”

“Alexander Gabriel Claremont-Diaz, you’re not _listening_ to me. I can’t marry you if you’ve been married before. There are literal precedents against it.”

Alex floundered.

“But you can _get_ divorced! Just look at Henry VIII, for crying out loud!”

Alex could practically see Henry running his hands through his hair the way he did when he was stressed – and also a little bit annoyed. Or maybe a lot annoyed. He had just completely scrambled their wedding plans. A lot annoyed was fair, given the circumstances.

“Exactly – Henry VIII. It’s entirely his fault. Gran isn’t just Queen. Thanks to Henry, she’s also Head of the Church of England. And _as_ Defender of the Faith, the reigning monarch has to hold up religious tradition when it comes to who the heirs in the line of succession marry, which has _always_ excluded divorcees.”

“But – but what about your great aunt. Princess Isabel, right? She married a divorcee.”

“In the Church of Scotland. They don’t consider marriage a sacrament, so she completely side-stepped it. But Gran was already queen then and she’d had an heir, so she wasn’t high enough in the line of succession for it to matter.”

“You’re _third_ in line, that’s not _that_ close – fourth when they pass that law that stops men cutting to the front of the line because Bea’ll be in front of you, too. You’re hardly next in line.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m still in the immediate royal family.”

“Your mom married James Bond, for crying out loud!”

“Yeah – _unmarried_ James Bond.”

“Christ.” Alex pinched the bridge of his nose and screwed his eyes shut.

Absently, he found himself making a list in his head.

  1. He was an idiot.
  2. He was a massive idiot.
  3. He was a massive fucking idiot.



*

A message:

Auntie Pezza: oh shit dude

A message:

irl chaos demon: what are you gonna do now? sorry btw 🙈 pls tell me you can sort this out?????

A message:

Bug: I’m sure it’ll all work out. Don’t worry about it too much

A headline:

DIVORCEE DISASTER: ROYAL WEDDING ON THE ROCKS?

*

“Who would’ve thought that the insurmountable obstacle preventing us from tying the knot _wouldn’t_ be the gay thing?” Alex said when they finally sat down in the same room together to talk about it.

“Ha ha.”

“No seriously, I bet your homophobic ancestors are having a field day over the fact that _this_ is what managed to trip us up.”

“Henry VIII has _so much_ to answer for,” Henry said, shaking his head. He was smiling, but there was a definite tension under the surface.

“We’ll sort it,” Alex said taking his hand. “Don’t worry.”

Henry nodded. “Yeah.”

Scotland was off the cards.

“I told you, I’m too close in the line of succession for that to fly.”

“Can’t they just – I don’t know – make an exception?”

“I think Gran’s a bit touchy about it. She refused to give her sister permission to marry a divorcee – and Isabel had to bend all the rules backwards to do it when she did. It was a whole scandal. And she picked her moment, too. We’d be looking at waiting for Philip to have kids if we did it that way.”

“Well, tell him to hurry up, then! Hasn’t he had long enough to be working on it? Isn’t he always banging on about _royal duty?_ _Tradition? Sense of propriety?_ ”

“I would, but I don’t think that tack is going to work for us.”

Alex grimaced. “I never thought I’d see the day that I was cheering for Philip to hurry up and have his own spawn.”

*

“Mum, you can’t be serious.”

Alex had never had a facetime conference call with Buckingham Palace before, but he supposed there was a first time for everything.

Henry’s mom was currently leading a charge against the Church of England. And it didn’t seem to be going well.

“I’m sorry, Catherine, but I just can’t allow it.”

“ _Why_?” Came Henry’s mom’s response, and her tone of voice suggested that if this wasn’t a virtual meeting, nothing would have prevented her from lunging across a meeting table at her mother.

Perhaps Queen Mary had learnt her lesson from the last time that she had hauled them into the palace for a royal bollocking.

“I refused my sister permission to marry the man she loved. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life – but my duty to the crown must always come first. I cannot make one rule for one and another for someone else.”

“But that was _forty_ years ago! And it’s not like Auntie Izzy is going to kick up a fuss – she’s been dead for nearly a decade! I think you can put that one behind you!”

Alex watched the two of them go head to head like he was watching a ping pong match being fiercely contested. Unfortunately, the ball being tossed back and forth was his life.

Queen Mary sighed, but didn’t say anything.

“You denied your sister happiness, mum,” Catherine pressed. “Are you going to do that to your grandson, as well?”

“Our birth right isn’t happiness,” came the Queen’s response. “Our birth right is duty. It’s tradition.”

“For _fuck’s sake,_ mum,” Catherine snapped, and Alex glanced at Henry, eyes wide. “They’re _already_ two men getting married. How non-traditional can you get? If you say you’re happy with the gay thing but not the divorcee thing, everyone’s going to think that you’re clutching at straws because the gay thing _really is_ your problem – and you can’t afford that kind of negative press. Not after all the good work Henry and Alex have done to salvage our public image in the past few years.”

The Queen’s mouth thinned, but Alex could see that she was considering it.

“I will have to think about it.”

The call dropped.

*

“Listen, we are going to fix this. I _refuse_ to let this get in the way of this wedding. Anyone who stands in my way is going to wish they weren’t born.”

Alex took a slight step back from Bea, who was radiating a slightly wrathful intensity.

June nodded in agreement.

Soon, he discovered that there was nothing that couldn’t be done by two older sisters who were on the warpath for their baby brothers.

“Westminster Abbey’s out,” Bea said.

They were surrounded by scraps of paper with hastily scribbled notes on them and laptops with detailed spreadsheets that Bea and June had both clearly been working on on Google docs from the moment that the consequences of the interview had become apparent.

“I’ve never wanted to get married there, anyway,” Henry said.

Bea wrinkled her nose in sympathy.

“How come?” June asked, as she screwed up a sticky note with WESTMINSTER ABBEY written on it and threw it into the garbage.

“Philip and Martha got married there,” Henry said, making a face. “And anyway,” he pulled the post-its that read WINDSOR CASTLE and ST PAUL’S off the wall distractedly, “the only way I ever saw myself getting married there was to some heiress that Gran had picked out and paid off to keep quiet. Not exactly the height of romance.”

Alex took his hand, squeezed.

“There’s nothing romantic about a venue that you’ve been basically threatened with since birth,” Bea agreed, although her tone was light.

“It’s a good thing we’re already non-traditional.”

*

“I think we should get married in New York,” Alex said, at the exact same time that Henry said, “I think I should abdicate.”

It was the middle of the night, a cool breeze blowing in through the open window of their bedroom and gently disturbing the curtains.

It was the sort of conversation that could only happen outside of daylight hours, when, Alex knew, Henry liked to think things through, to workshop and brainstorm ideas that might be shot down in the cold light of day.

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve had a long, long time to think about this. I’ve never wanted this. _Never_.” The last word came out in a whisper and Alex knitted their fingers together.

“But that would mean – ”

“Anything.” Then, “ _Everything_.”

“Marry me in New York, not-Prince Henry,” Alex whispered.

*

BREAKING: PRINCE HENRY PARTS WAYS WITH ROYAL FAMILY

PRINCE HENRY AND ALEX CLAREMONT-DIAZ MARRY IN SECRET PRIVATE CEREMONY AS PRINCE WAIVES TITLE

INSIDE BUCK HOUSE: HOW ALEX CLAREMONT-DIAZ ORCHESTRATED PRINCE HENRY’S ABDICATION

*

_THE NEW YORK TIMES_

_PRINCE HENRY QUITS ROYAL FAMILY TO MARRY FORMER FSOTUS_

_In a shocking turn of events, Buckingham Palace announced today that it is Prince Henry’s wish to abdicate from the British royal family and relinquish his title as third in line to the throne. The announcement came on the heels of the shock Instagram post made by Prince Henry’s now husband, former FSOTUS and human rights lawyer Alex Claremont-Diaz, which confirmed the couple had privately married in New York. It is still unconfirmed as to whether this was without the Palace’s permission and no formal statement from the Palace or the former first family has been made._

_Though neither Prince Henry nor Alex have been available for comment, the official Palace statement claimed that Henry’s abdication marked a renegotiation of his public life and image, away from royal life, but stressed that the prince would continue to work on non-profit projects, as he has done for the past five years, for example through his work with LGBTQ+ youth shelters and community projects…_

*

There was only one number that Alex was willing to answer when he saw the caller ID flash into view on his phone. It was the first day of his honeymoon, after all, and the thing was on silent, Google alerts firmly switched off as headlines and articles ricocheted around the ether.

“You absolute shit.” Despite the customary greeting, Alex could hear the grin on Zahra’s face. “I am so glad I’m no longer your handler. I hope you pay them well – I hope you sent them god damn fruit baskets to apologise for this, do you hear me? And gave them all a raise. Why is everything always a scandal with you two?”

“I like to keep their jobs interesting. Where would they be without me?”

“With five years added to their lifespan and significantly less wrinkles.”

Alex laughed, looked over at Henry, who was poking through the day’s copy of _Le Monde_ , a coffee steaming in front of him, hair mussed, the very picture of domesticity. Alex’s eyes caught on the wedding ring, snug on his hand.

“Congratulations, you little shit.”


End file.
